


Orthocentre

by prairiecrow



Series: Geometry [6]
Category: Knight Rider (1982), Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Friendship/Love, Light BDSM, Love Triangles, M/M, Obsession, Pansexual Character, Pheromones, Polyamory, Service Top, Topping from the Bottom, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 04:36:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Orthocentre: The point where the three "altitudes" of a triangle meet — in this case, a triangle with three unequal sides, and Jack Harkness in the middle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gwen Cooper

Jack Harkness had met uncounted people in his long and chequered life — male and female and everything in between, humans and aliens and machines, fools and sages, whores and kings. Slept with as many of them as would succumb to his winning smile and dazzling physical attributes, too. But up until about four months ago, only two of them had held absolute pride of place in his immortal heart: a certain beloved Doctor, away travelling the galaxies under the guise of an ever-changing face, and a former policewoman of Earth, working and fighting and laughing every day at his side. 

Gwen Cooper, who possessed such limitless compassion and sympathy and simple human warmth that she'd reawakened those dormant qualities in Jack, and how could he possibly fail to love her for that? She was an irresistible catalyst, and he often wondered if she really understood how much her brave, bright, caring presence had changed him for the better.

Every time Jack looked at her, by daylight or moonlight or the Hub's atmospheric tapestry of light and shadow, his heart swelled with admiration and pride — and with more gratitude than he could easily express. She was the most glowing example he'd recently encountered of the best humanity had to offer, and she was so physically lovely besides: large soulful eyes, a sweep of shining raven hair, full lips almost begging to be kissed… even the little gap between her front teeth was an adorable defining detail that only made him all the more smitten.

 _Do you know what you do to me?_ The words sprang to the tip of his tongue an a regular basis, driven by the yearning beat of his heart. _Do you comprehend how the beauty of you makes this remarkable world even better and brighter? If only I could show you! If only…_

But that could never be, and Jack was smart enough to realize it.

A person like Gwen Cooper came along only once in long spans of decades, and if the option had been open to him Jack wouldn't have hesitated to take her for his primary mate… but there were factors in play that ruled out any possibility of that outcome. For one thing, there was Rhys Williams, and in that respect Gwen was a model woman of the early twentieth-first century: she'd clearly chosen her single romantic and sexual partner, and Jack could not in good conscience do anything to seriously disrupt their pair-bond. Even more significantly, as a typical woman of her native culture she wouldn't have been able to easily endure Jack's fifty-first century sexual proclivities, and although Jack had been able to confine himself to a single partner once or twice in the past he remembered well how unnatural and tense those bonds had felt, and he wasn't willing to taint his relationship with this remarkable woman by infusing it with so much stress and resentment. 

It was all academic anyway. Gwen had a ring on her left hand, and that was the end of that. Given how crazy in love she obviously was with her lorry-wrangling fiancé, Jack couldn't find it in his heart to be anything less than happy on her behalf.

And yet…

She remained in all her wondrous shining intensity, so close at hand. Her eyes, gazing into his own and seeming to draw forth all his secrets. Her smile, stirring his essential substance in so many ways. Her joyful laughter, making his own heart sing with delight until he wanted to reach out and pull her to him and kiss her until she smiled up at him with a different quality of adoration, one that would leave the man she'd already chosen in the dust.

Close enough to touch… 

If he tried, Jack knew he could do it. He had no illusions about the power of his own charisma, or that she wasn't already leaning in his direction. He could detect it in her scent, so subtle and so enticing: on a purely physical level, she wanted him very much.

But for the sake of friendship — and yes, for the sake of a powerful and abiding love that would never be brought to natural fulfillment — Jack had to keep his hands (and everything else) to himself.

So he did, as difficult as that sometimes proved while the days and months and years spun out between them. He smiled encouragingly when she talked about the sweet man who'd put that ring on her finger, and he looked the other way when she broke her own rules and went to Owen's bed, and he reminded himself that whoever she chose to grace with her sexual favours, that man could never be him.

It couldn't be, because he loved her so much, even if he could never do anything more than dream about having her for himself.

[TO BE CONTINUED in Chapter Two: Ianto Jones]


	2. Ianto Jones

Ianto Jones, on the other hand…

Compared to the nearly operatic passion he felt for Gwen Cooper, Jack's feelings regarding Torchwood's boyish factotum were of more modest dimensions: passionate, yes, but comfortingly fond rather than ecstatically soaring. Ianto supplied a dose of methodical practicality that Jack's life sorely needed. Where Jack was a tireless jet engine driven by the zip fuel of impulsive genius, Ianto was slow and measured and controlled and reasonable; when Jack inevitably went haring off into the wild blue yonder, Ianto remained firmly anchored to terra firma. The young Welshman balanced his much older leader in a way that kept the team stable, and Jack was never anything less than grateful for the numerous services he provided.

And when he had Ianto's smooth pale body beneath him, choking back low urgent moans while Jack's hands and mouth and cock worked their crazy-making magic, he was grateful for this too: that he had a willing sexual playmate always close at hand, saving him the trouble of having to go out hunting for random partners. He would kiss those tightly closed eyelids and stroke Ianto's sweat-slick skin, murmuring tender reassurances — _Breathe, baby, breathe for me, that's it, open up for me, let me in_ — and Ianto, in spite of his sweet reticence about being too loud or too uninhibited, much less having seven and a half inches of hard male prick up his tight little ass, would inevitably surrender, coming apart in a glorious mess of thrusting and thrashing and nearly desperate wails of bliss. 

Lying together afterwards with his younger lover in his arms, Jack would close his eyes and bask in the bone-deep contentment of their physical proximity… and in the heart that lay beating so close to his own, because although he didn't yearn for Ianto the way he yearned for Gwen, he still appreciated the finer qualities of his archivist's spirit. It wasn't the same quality of love, but it was love nonetheless: quiet, reliable, sustaining, nourishing…

… just like Ianto himself.

When their gazes met across the Hub, Jack would flash a smile that was meant for those keen blue eyes alone, the smile that said: _We may be free to sleep with whoever we like, but you're mine, aren't you? In all the ways that matter._

And when Ianto's cupid's-bow lips would quirk subtly in response, Jack knew that the message had been received and understood — and acknowledged, with every solicitous cup of coffee brought to his desk and every line of banter and every kiss shared in mutual delight. 

He knew he was cared for, and that he was loved in return. Such consolations certainly weren't to be taken for granted in a cold and savage world. 

[TO BE CONTINUED in Chapter Three: KITT]


	3. KITT

Speaking of savage…

KITT was a symphony of graceful elements artfully composed around a core of unquenchable fire: precise in every detail, yes, but Jack wasn't enough of a fool to mistake that control for inhibition, or for anything less than the steel-boned ferocity of a relentlessly disciplined mind. Everything about the android was positively magnetic — at least to Jack, who seemed to be the only individual its pheromones had accurately targeted. It had taken almost four months, and he'd resisted the lure of it with every skill he possessed and every ounce of willpower at his command… but in the end he'd fallen — 

— and KITT had caught him. Or perhaps it was even safe to say: they'd caught each other.

As intoxicated as he was by the biochemical cocktail the android's body produced, Jack was under no illusions about why KITT had elected to come to his bed: the A.I. was a curious creature by design, and had found human mating rituals fascinating even when installed in a robotic car. Given the unexpected gift of a humanoid body, it only made sense that he'd want to conduct some research, and Jack was beyond a shadow of a doubt the best qualified teacher he could ever hope to find.

So they'd become lovers, even though KITT's only truly overriding desire was to get back to his home dimension and the handsome pilot he'd been forced to leave behind. Jack didn't kid himself about that either, or try to pretend that KITT would ever say his name with half the force of adoration and reverence he granted the words _Michael Knight_. No, Jack held fast to the truth, even when it tore his beating heart from his chest and left it bleeding black misery in KITT's flawless, cruelly innocent, undying hands.

Even then, he couldn't resist moving in closer. Close enough to lose all perspective. Close enough to bite. Definitely close enough to fuck, because whatever else KITT's current body had been designed for — energy manipulation, data extraction, hand-to-hand combat — someone, somewhere, had also put a lot of time and effort into making it supremely well-suited to satisfying Jack's darker animal appetites.

Consequently the sexual games Jack chose to play with the android were ones of bondage and discipline: a collar around that slender throat, leather cuffs, red silk ropes… or at the very least, hands that had to be left exactly where Jack put them. He was definitely a 'service top' in the sense that he was always keenly attuned to what KITT wanted rather than concentrating primarily on his own desires, but at the same time he was stern and commanding and brooked no trace of insubordination… even if he didn't always curb KITT's tendency to top from the bottom as relentlessly as he should. Even if sometimes he let his own needs get the better of him and dared to let himself be mutually touched in ways that drove the pulse of his lusts to blinding heights, he'd always been able to pull out of the spiral before things went too far. He'd always been able to get KITT back under control, and to administer proper punishment for what were, after all, actions that defied KITT's own essential nature as a creature built to serve its human masters.

Or at least, that's what Jack kept telling himself. He deliberately didn't voice the real reason for the conspicuous trappings of dominance: _I bind you like this because you bound me first with your beauty and your wit and the maddening scent of you, I love you beyond all sanity and reason, and if I set you free, if I let you touch me without restraint… you'd shatter me with the uninhibited impact of the first caress._

_This is for my own protection, as much as it is for your pleasure._

Jack might be stupid enough to play with fire, but he was at least smart enough to resist the urge to immolate himself utterly on the pyre of a perfection as immortal as his own.

[TO BE CONTINUED in Chapter Four: Jack Harkness]


	4. Jack Harkness

And so it came down to this: Jack Harkness, at the centre of a sexual and romantic triangle where none of the the other three points related to each other. Two of them were involved with him sexually, two of them could never know how deeply he loved them, and at no point did all the factors — physical intimacy, romantic attachment and emotional honesty — overlap in a single person. 

If they had, Jack would have counted himself the luckiest man on the face of the planet. 

But they didn't, and therefore all he could do was strive to keep the tensions in some form of balance that wouldn't rip him into too many pieces.

He closed his hand hard over the nape of an alluring immortal's neck and whispered ardent orders into its golden hair, guiding its wicked blameless mouth to parts of his body only marginally less vulnerable than his heart.

He wrapped his arms around a drowsy young man's contented body and stroked soothing patterns over his skin, conveying through touch all the tenderness he'd never cheapen with mere words.

He kept his distance from a young woman who shone like the sun in eclipse, granting her the greatest gift he could bestow: love enough for a mortal lifetime, and a form of ignorance that would shield her bright spirit from pain she couldn't even begin to imagine.

And in the end, if he spent too many nights staring sleeplessly into the darkness… well, that was just another of the many secrets in his keeping, and nobody's business but his own.

THE END


End file.
